Student perceptions of online activities in a blended graduate seminar revealed the most effective to have four distinct design features: they promoted higher-order thinking skills and learner-learner interactions and provided personalized content and feedback on contributions.
In another multidisciplinary graduate seminar, students’ “microblogs” enhanced content learning and fostered community over the course of the semester.
This review summarized the effectiveness of learning communities in higher education with best practices for the development and implementation of learning communities.
This article supplies more examples of learning-community classrooms with discussions around the framework of learning communities (e.g., goals, learning activities, teacher roles, and power relationships).
Canvas appointment groups allow students to sign up for meetings with teaching staff, either individually or in groups, providing a seamless experience from the course content to the student's schedule.
Harvard Graduate School of Education'sUsable Knowledge discusses ethical collaboration and offers examples to help instructors understand students' pressure to achieve.
Instructional Moves featured faculty member Dan Levy, fosters a learning culture by laying the groundwork for open, honest, and constructive collaboration
Researchers explored collaborative curricular design as a form of instructor professional development, identifying three key process features: situatedness (how closely related the task is to the instructor’s work or class); agency (if they are actively involved in problem definition and...
Researchers describe and analyze a model for developing student–staff partnerships to enhance teaching and learning, where students act as consultants providing timely and focused feedback to instructors on aspects of their practice, finding that face-to-face follow-up meetings produced the best...
A recently published paper by VPAL-Research Menschel Senior Research Scientist Yigal Rosen highlighted the importance of group composition in collaborative assignments, and the potential to create more balanced (and effective) groups by including interactive computer-based agents.